README.md

An Envoy-Powered API Gateway

Gloo is a feature-rich, Kubernetes-native ingress controller, and next-generation API gateway. Gloo is exceptional in its function-level routing; its support for legacy apps, microservices and serverless; its discovery capabilities; its numerous features; and its tight integration with leading open-source projects. Gloo is uniquely designed to support hybrid applications, in which multiple technologies, architectures, protocols, and clouds can coexist.

Hybrid apps: Gloo creates applications that route to backends implemented as microservices, serverless functions, and legacy apps. This feature can help users to gradually migrate from their legacy code to microservices and serverless; can let users add new functionalities using cloud-native technologies while maintaining their legacy codebase; can be used in cases where different teams in an organization choose different architectures; and more. See here for more on the Hybrid App paradigm.

What makes Gloo unique

Function-level routing allows integration of legacy applications, microservices and serverless: Gloo can route requests directly to functions, which can be a serverless function call (e.g. Lambda, Google Cloud Function, OpenFaaS function, etc.), an API call on a microservice or a legacy service (e.g. a REST API call, OpenAPI operation, XML/SOAP request etc.), or publishing to a message queue (e.g. NATS, AMQP, etc.). This unique ability is what makes Gloo the only API gateway that supports hybrid apps, as well as the only one that does not tie the user to a specific paradigm.

Gloo incorporates vetted open-source projects to provide broad functionality: Gloo support high-quality features by integrating with top open-source projects, including gRPC, GraphQL, OpenTracing, NATS and more. Gloo's architecture allows rapid integration of future popular open-source projects as they emerge.

Full automated discovery lets users move fast: Upon launch, Gloo creates a catalog of all available destinations, and continuously maintains it up to date. This takes the responsibility for 'bookkeeping' away from the developers, and guarantees that new feature become available as soon as they are ready. Gloo discovers across IaaS, PaaS and FaaS providers, as well as Swagger, gRPC, and GraphQL.